After our weekly Knead 2 Know presentation which featured a presentation from PwintPhyu Nandar MeSc '24, folks migrated from the Yale Farm to the Humanities Quadrangle Lecture Hall for a screening of Jaime Sunwoo’s performance film SPECIALLY PROCESSED AMERICAN ME (2022). The screening and Q&A with multidisciplinary artist Jaime Sunwoo '14 following the film was part of the Chewing the Fat speaker series, kicking off a weekend of events for Sunwoo, including a Shadow Puppetry workshop hosted by the Historical, Artistic, and Cultural Resources team of Yale’s Asian American Cultural Center.
Laughs and chuckles were heard throughout the hall during one of Specially Processed’s opening scenes: three Hormel Girls singing a jingle about all things SPAM, creatively using acrostic lyrics repeating the word S-P-A-M. These characters’ jingles, accompanied by a Hormel Cadet, are pieces of absurd humor interwoven throughout the autobiographical performance based upon Sunwoo’s Asian American upbringing and family experiences during and after the Korean War. The characters in Sunwoo’s play reference the Hormel Girls, an all-female performance group from the late 1940s who toured around the country promoting Hormel products, including SPAM.
Written by Sunwoo and co-directed by Sunwoo and Karim Muasher, Specially Processed tells Sunwoo’s story through the product SPAM, the canned meat. It investigates SPAM's legacy in the military, and its significance in the Asia-Pacific, from Mukbang’s trends on YouTube to shadow puppetry scenes depicting stories of the War itself, as remembered by Sunwoo’s grandmother.
During the Q&A, Sunwoo shared more of her creative process in writing the play, particularly how her family’s oral histories informed the storyline. When asked what it was like to run the show, Sunwoo explained that the play ran while masking and pandemic restrictions were still heavily present in New York’s theater scene, shaping both rehearsal capacity and viewer experience. She also articulated her thought process for certain costume and design decisions such as the large can of SPAM, noting that certain surreal aspects of the play are reflective of her emotions and perceptions of familial stories told throughout the play.
“It's been ten years since I graduated, and it was so joyful to return to share such a personal project. My time studying at Yale was foundational for my art practice. There, I dived into so many fields—art, history, science—and that curiosity still fuels my multidisciplinary, research-inspired process.” Sunwoo wrote on Instagram, following her visit.
We are grateful for Jaime’s time and thoughtful insights from graduating Yale, as well as Anthony Sudol for making the screening possible. Sunwoo’s visit was generously organized in partnership with Stella Choi '26, Ishikaa Kothari '25, Assistant Dean Joliana Yee of the Asian American Cultural Center, and sponsored by the Traphagen Alumni Speakers Series of the Yale College Office of Student Affairs, the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, and the Yale School of Environment 1980 Fund.